After warm winter, Alaska ships in snow for start of Iditarod race

March 4, 2016

Updated 12:55 p.m.

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Workers offload an Alaska Railroad train that delivered tons of snow to Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday after traveling 360 miles south from Fairbanks. The snow will be used to help provide a picturesque ground cover on the streets for the ceremonial start of the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Anchorage, where persistent above-freezing temperatures have melted much of the local snow. The competitive part of the race kicks off Sunday 50 miles to the north in Willow. RACHEL D’ORO , THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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An Alaska Railroad train carries tons of snow in Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday after traveling 360 miles south from Fairbanks. RACHEL D’ORO , THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Workers offload an Alaska Railroad train that delivered tons of snow to Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday after traveling 360 miles south from Fairbanks. The snow will be used to help provide a picturesque ground cover on the streets for the ceremonial start of the 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Anchorage, where persistent above-freezing temperatures have melted much of the local snow. The competitive part of the race kicks off Sunday 50 miles to the north in Willow. RACHEL D’ORO , THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

As mushers and their dogs prepare for the Iditarod sled dog race, the fabled sledding trek through Alaska’s wilderness, a warm winter has once again robbed the starting line of a key race ingredient: snow.

To make sure racers are greeted with snow at the start of their roughly 1,000-mile journey, organizers decided to ask the Alaska Railroad to trundle in about 350 cubic yards of it from snowier locales. It is the first time the railroad has had to ship snow from Fairbanks to Anchorage. The shipping service was donated, according to a railroad official.

“Moving snow out of the way, we don’t usually bring it to somewhere else,” Tim Sullivan, a spokesman for the railroad, told The Associated Press.

According to the National Weather Service, 27 inches of snow has fallen in the Anchorage area since July. The area normally sees about 61 inches in that span of time.

The backup snow arrived Thursday, the boulder-shaped material filling up several train cars that are designed to flip open and dump out their contents. It is enough snow to blanket a football field up to 3 inches, but it is apparently not enough to cover Anchorage’s 11-mile ceremonial track — that course will be eight miles shorter this year, officials said.

Warm weather has forced organizers of the 43-year-old race to fiddle with the starting locations in recent years. Last year, the starting line was moved 225 miles north, to Fairbanks from Willow. This year, the official restart of the race will be held in Willow on Sunday. The course will snake northward for more than 900 miles, until the finish line in Nome.

Unseasonably warm weather — along with volcanic activity, wandering buffalo and, of course, too much snow — has impacted parts of the trail for decades, but mushers must persevere. (One of the main rules of the Iditarod is that the race will be held whatever the conditions.) But in recent years, climbing temperatures in the state have created difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions for mushers and their dogs, resulting in the cancellation of other races. In January, organizers were forced to cancel the Tustumena 200 Sled Dog Race because of a lack of snow and “way too much open water,” officials said on Facebook.

The larger races continue, but not without concerns. In February, patches of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest trail were free of snow, which could affect the safety of sled dogs.

“The warm weather’s going to be quite something,” one musher, Luc Tweddell, told Canada’s CBC News. “It’s hard on the dogs. On the musher, it’s fine, but on the dogs, it’s harder to get food into them and stuff like that.”

Alaska’s tourism industry relies on the ability of people to attend a race like the Iditarod, and some mushers rely on the tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. But the consequences of warmer winters go well beyond affecting the viability of a sledding race.

According to a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, temperatures are rising in Alaska at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the United States. In the past 60 years, average temperatures have risen by 3 degrees across the state, and warming in the winter has increased by 6 degrees. The change has threatened the breeding and feeding habitats for birds and caribou, and has affected water and food sources for native Alaskans.

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